In the previous part we examined Shlomo HaMelech's words "בכל עצב יהיה מותר", "in all sadness there is an advantage," together with the parable of the general. Now we need to clarify: which kind of sadness is it that produces that "advantage"?
The answer: a genuine sadness, and even a genuine sadness of this sort is not something one does every day. True, the wording "בכל עצב," "in all sadness," hints that even from sadness that is not as it should be one can extract something useful: if a person has already fallen into atzvus (depression), let him at least have the presence of mind to make use of it and catch the right wave, and the Alter Rebbe will show the way to do this in the coming chapters. But in general what is being spoken of here is a planned sadness, a planned merirus (bitterness).
As the Alter Rebbe will stress further on: atzvus that simply falls upon a person in the middle of the day, with no preparation at all, comes from the yetzer hara, which is out to confuse his mind. Genuine sadness has to come in a planned way, in his words: "לעתים מזומנים", "at set times."
"At set times": sadness that is planned
A person fixes an hour for himself, once a day, once a week or once a month, when he sits down and makes a cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul: what happened, what could he have done, and where is it in his power to repair. This is not something one does at every moment. Even a businessman does not close his business every day to draw up a balance sheet; he does it once a year, or once in a while. That is "at set times."
And at those set times, when he sits down with his situation and his sins, he sits "במר נפשו ולב נשבר", "in the bitterness of his soul and with a broken heart." Here merirus is hinted at: not atzvus but merirus, and merirus comes with vitality.
There is a well known saying quoted in the name of the Rebbes of Kotzk:
There is nothing straighter than a crooked ladder. There is nothing blacker than white shrouds, and there is nothing more whole than a broken heart.
The broken heart is in fact something whole, when it comes in a planned way: when a person decides to sit down and break his yetzer, telling it, "You are only confusing my mind, and I am capable of rising above this." And what does he gain by it? Who is it who is really broken at that hour? "שעל ידי זה נשברה רוח הטומאה והסטרא אחרא", "for through this the spirit of impurity and the sitra achra is broken."
The partition between a person and his Father in Heaven
Godliness is joy, the Holy One Blessed Be He is joy, Torah and mitzvos are joy. What, then, causes a person's joy to be lacking? Partitions that prevent holiness from penetrating into his soul. The sadness, the low spirits, the heaviness and the laziness all come from his sins: every sin a person commits sets up another barrier in front of the light of holiness, and when the light does not come through, the person becomes sad and sinks into decline. It is this blockage that has to be shattered and broken.
And how is the partition broken? When a person plans for set times to contemplate with bitterness where he stands and how to get out of it. And what is bitter to him? Not "why was I not perfect," "why did I not get a grade of ten," "why did nobody pat me on the back"; thoughts like these only drag him down. He is thinking about the Holy One Blessed Be He, not about himself: why did I not seize the opportunity to be connected to Him through learning Torah and doing a mitzvah, and certainly in those tests where I failed and cut myself off. It is this thought that breaks his heart.
And who is broken? In the Alter Rebbe's words: "נשברה רוח הטומאה והסטרא אחרא", "the spirit of impurity and the sitra achra is broken." The very partition that separates him from Godliness is what breaks, "ומחיצה של ברזל המפסקת בינו לאביו שבשמיים", "and the iron partition that divides between him and his Father in Heaven." "עוונותיכם היו מבדילים", "your sins have been separating": the sin is like an iron partition. Nothing in the world stands between a Jew and the Holy One Blessed Be He; only his sins are what will not let him feel close, and that is broken through the sadness which he calls true sadness. "כמו שכתוב בזוהר על פסוק רוח נשברה לב נשבר ונדכה", "as is written in the Zohar on the verse, 'a broken spirit, a heart broken and crushed,'" and the verse continues, "אלוקים לא תבזה", "O God, You will not despise." "ואזי יקיים בו רישא דקרא", "and then the beginning of the passage will be fulfilled in him": "תשמיעני ששון ושמחה" וגו', "let me hear joy and gladness," "השיבה לי ששון ישעך ורוח נדיבה" וגו', "restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and a generous spirit."
Why is the order of the mizmor reversed?
At first glance the verses of the mizmor run in reverse order. Here is how they appear:
"תשמיעני ששון ושמחה", "Let me hear joy and gladness."
"השיבה לי ששון ישעך ורוח נדיבה", "Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and a generous spirit."
"זבחי אלוקים רוח נשברה", "The offerings of God are a broken spirit."
"לב נשבר ונדכה", "A heart broken and crushed."
Surely the order should be the reverse: first a broken heart, out of which comes a broken spirit, and out of that, "let me hear joy and gladness." And that is in fact how the Alter Rebbe presents it: after he has a broken heart, and that produces a broken spirit, then there will be fulfilled in him what is written at the opening of the mizmor, "let me hear joy and gladness."
The answer is simple: the mizmorim do not always follow the chronological order of events, but the order of importance of the ideas. First the goal is stated, and afterwards it is described how one arrives there. The goal: "let me hear joy and gladness." The road to it: "a broken spirit," the breaking of the spirit of the kelipah. And the road to "a broken spirit": "a heart broken and crushed." This is the "מותר," the advantage that this sadness, this merirus, this true sadness, brings a person, and this is what Shlomo HaMelech meant.
The Arizal's tikkun: Mizmor 51 before learning
"וזהו טעם הפשוט לתיקון האר"י ז"ל לומר מזמור זה אחר תיקון חצות קודם הלימוד", "and this is the simple reason for the practice instituted by the Arizal, to say this mizmor after tikkun chatzos, before learning." The reference is to Mizmor 51, which we say in krias shema she'al hamittah. Tikkun chatzos is a time of bitterness: weeping over the Beis HaMikdash, the general one and the private one, over the fact that there is no revelation of the Shechinah in the world and no revelation of the Shechinah in the soul. That is the merirus being spoken of.
And what does a person do after tikkun chatzos? He does not go back to sleep. He does not get up at midnight, say a few mizmorim and return to bed; he says tikkun chatzos and then sits down to learn until the light of morning, with joy. That is why the Arizal says: after tikkun chatzos, before the learning, before he sits down to study, let him say Mizmor 51, from which he will understand the whole purpose of tikkun chatzos, "let me hear joy and gladness." The learning has to come from joy, and how will it come from joy? After that period of bitterness in tikkun chatzos, in which there was a broken spirit, joy comes afterwards, "כדי ללמוד בשמחה אמיתית בה' הבאה אחר העצב", "in order to learn with the true joy in Hashem that comes after the sadness."
True joy can only come after sadness. It is like a person sitting in a dark room, when suddenly someone walks in with a candle or a flashlight and lights the place up. What genuine joy and delight there is in the light precisely because darkness came first.
So too in the parable of the general we brought earlier. A loyal general returning from battle is in utter bitterness, not because he did not succeed and not because he received no medal, but because he let the king down. And when he suddenly sees that another general succeeded in battle and the king was victorious, he goes out dancing and rejoices for him, for from the start he was not thinking of himself at all. What was it that pained him? Not the medal he did not receive, but that the king's reign had not spread over the whole country; and now, when the king has succeeded, he dances. It becomes clear, then, that what he had before was merirus.
And so in the nimshal: if a person is bitter over the fact that he did not manage to be close to Godliness, then the moment someone tells him, "Come and learn Torah," and Torah is Godliness and through it he connects to the Holy One Blessed Be He, he will learn with joy and dance with happiness. For what was his bitterness about? That he was far, and that he had failed to awaken a Divine revelation within himself because of the sin he stumbled in. And when the opportunity is handed to him to be filled with that happiness and to connect, he sits and learns with joy.
And it must be emphasized: all this applies only to planned sadness, not to sadness that comes by chance. If atzvus falls upon a person on its own, it comes from the yetzer hara. Later in the chapter and at its end we will learn that if atzvus descends on a person in the middle of the day, while he is sitting at his machine, over the sins he stumbled in last night, he should say to the yetzer hara: be quiet now, this is not the time to talk to me about sins, step aside. But when it is planned, when he sits down and says, "Now I want to make an accounting of my soul and know what is happening with me," and he genuinely cares about where he stands, then precisely afterwards he bursts into joy, for he is looking for the opportunity to connect, and when he has it he rejoices.
"Like the advantage of light over darkness"
"ויש לשמחה זו יתרון כיתרון האור הבא מן החושך דווקא, כמו שכתוב בזוהר על פסוק: וראיתי שיש יתרון לחכמה מן הסכלות כיתרון האור מן החושך", "and this joy has an advantage, like the advantage of light that comes specifically out of darkness, as is written in the Zohar on the verse, 'And I saw that there is an advantage to wisdom over folly, like the advantage of light over darkness.'" Here the Alter Rebbe does not quote the verse in full and leaves out a word, for the verse reads, "וראיתי אני שיש יתרון," "and I, I saw that there is an advantage." Shlomo HaMelech is saying: I, the wisest of all men, saw that there is an advantage to wisdom over folly.
And on the face of it, what is the novelty? Any ordinary person knows that folly is foolishness that nobody wants to arrive at, and that wisdom has the advantage. But according to the explanation in Tanya, Shlomo HaMelech is speaking of a very great wisdom indeed: a wisdom that grew out of the folly. Just as in creation it says of every day "ויהי ערב ויהי בוקר", "and it was evening and it was morning," first evening, first darkness, and out of the darkness one arrives at the morning, so too: first the sadness and the merirus, and out of that bitterness one is able to treasure the joy.
And if a person does not treasure it, if he does not know what he is losing when he disconnects, then neither does he know how to treasure what he has when he has it. Someone who has nothing and then suddenly receives treasures every penny; someone who always has and never felt the lack does not know how to rejoice in it.
Shlomo HaMelech does not mean to place wisdom on one pan of the scale and folly on the other and announce that wisdom is better than folly. That is obvious, and there would be no need whatsoever to say it. His intent is that on one and the same pan we place wisdom alone: wisdom that grew out of folly, or wisdom as it is in itself. Which wisdom is the greater? Says Shlomo HaMelech: wisdom that comes out of folly, that is wisdom; light that comes out of darkness, that is light; joy that comes out of sadness, that is joy. And in the Alter Rebbe's words: "ודי למבין", "and this is enough for one who understands."
In summary: the "advantage" in sadness comes specifically from a true, planned sadness, "at set times," in which a person sits in the bitterness of his soul and with a broken heart over his distance from Godliness, and through this the spirit of impurity and the sitra achra is broken, along with the iron partition that divides between him and his Father in Heaven. We saw why the mizmor runs as it does, following the order of importance: the goal is "let me hear joy and gladness," the road to it is "a broken spirit," and the road to that is "a heart broken and crushed." We saw the Arizal's practice of saying this mizmor after tikkun chatzos, before learning, in order to learn with the true joy that comes after the sadness. And we saw the advantage of this joy: "like the advantage of light over darkness" and "an advantage to wisdom over folly," wisdom and light and joy that grow specifically out of their opposite.
In the next part we will take up the continuation of the chapter and learn how a person should conduct himself when atzvus falls upon him on its own, not at the set times.